Word: newfoundlands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Standing alone in the world with the confidence of a mature nation, Canada asserted its will and protected the common good by force. It is attempting to prevent the demise of the Grand Banks fisheries off Newfoundland's coast...
YOUNG KEVIN REEVEY HAS RUN away from St. Vincent's orphanage in Newfoundland, and when the police bring him back, Brother Peter Lavin, who runs the place, is there waiting. Full of forgiveness, the clergyman brings Kevin into his study and sits the boy on his lap. "You're home now, child," he says, kissing Kevin's cheek, his neck, his bare chest. His passion spilling into parental devotion, he whispers, "Mama loves you." Finally Kevin dares to mutter, "My mother's dead and always will be. You're not my mother." Poor little fellow, he must be punished-flogged...
This four-hour film is a fictionized chronicle of several cases of child abuse by Catholic clergy in Newfoundland during the 1960s. Airing in two parts -- Sunday and Monday -- on A&E (check local listings), the graphic drama raises troubling questions about the physical pain experienced by the young boys and the mental agony tormenting their abusers. TIME critic Richard Corliss describes it as "the most compelling, repellent and edifying horror movie of the decade," one with a complex message. The heroes in this film are "small, frightened boys or grown men who need to see righteous revenge achieved...
...Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative...
Eventually an observant janitor realizes the extent of the abuse in the orphanage and, together with one of the older boys, reports these heinous acts to doctors and authorities. The coldness and brutality of the external world is again shown, this time not in the form of the wintry Newfoundland landscape, but in the heartless bureaucracy of the state. In a painful scene, the efforts of one investigator to expose these moral injustices are blocked by the venal relations between the church and state. Part I of the film may end with the transfer of the guilty priests from...